Turkmen Women, Weaving and Cultural Change

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 <head><title>Turkmen Women, Weaving and
 Cultural Change</title></head>
 <byline> Mary A. Martin</byline>
 
 Turkmen carpets are fine examples of weaving done by
 nomadic tribal women. In the last 100 years the context of
 weaving these carpets has changed considerably; formerly
 women produced them in the home for local consumption,
 now contract weavers and female and male factory workers
 produce for urban and foreign markets. In the nineteenth
 century the Turkmen lived in the Kara Kum desert in that
 part of Central Asia which is now the Soviet Socialist Repub-
 lic of Turkmenistan. This tribe primarily raised sheep and
 occasionally farmed. They sometimes raided neighboring
 areas. Nomads, they lived in tents called yurts which could
 be packed up and taken with them when they moved from
 one grazing area to another.
 Traditionally women made textile items for domestic use.
 For their yurts they made felt walls and decorative bands.
 They also knotted or embroidered individual bags for carry
 ing tent poles, utensils, provisions and other household pos-
 sessions. A special carpet was hung at the entrance of the
 yurt and another was hung to function as a door.
 Carpets woven by women were central to household, cul-
 tural and religious life: used for entertaining, given as gifts,
 spread for community gatherings, used to furnish guesthous-
 es, and used for prayers. Turkmen society regarded a wom-
 an’s weaving skill much as it esteemed a man s code of valor;
 weaving defined a woman’s status, indirectly gave her access
 to wealth, was the one domaiń in which a woman was able to
 distinguish herself.
 In the latter half of the nineteenth century the life of the
 Turkmen changed because Russia took permanent political
 and military control and inhibited Turkmen raids of sur-
 rounding populations. At this time many Turkmen moved to
 Afghani territory although it was not until the 1920s that
 large numbers fled to Afghanistan to escape Soviet collectiv-
 ization.
 In Afghanistan the Turkmen competed for pastures and
 living space with other ethnic groups—Pashtun, Aimaq,
 Hazara, Tajik, Baluch, Arab and Uzbeg. As the pasturage
 was limited in Afghanistan and Turkmen flocks reduced,
 many Turkmen settled into villages; few continued to live as
 nomads in yurts. If families did not raise enough sheep to
 provide wool for their weaving needs they had to purchase
 it—no longer from other Turkmen but from other tribes,
 such as the tent-dwelling Pashtun. Individual or market
 trading formerly carried out with kinsmen and other Turk-
 men was now done with groups who were neither.
 The move to Afghanistan severely affected carpet weav-
 ing. For ten to fifteen years after arriving in Afghanistan
 Turkmen women did not make carpets.* When they began
 making carpets again, they had to overcome this break in
 tradition. They remembered carding, spinning and weaving
 techniques, but colors and patterns changed. Young girls
 had grown up without learning the traditional designs. When
 older women had died, they had taken with them the knowl-
 edge of traditional patterns and of dye recipes. Changes in
 color in twentieth-century carpets may also be related to the
 difficulty of obtaining customary vegetable dyes and mor-
 dants in a new ecological setting. The breed of sheep and
 quality of wool also differed in the new environment. De- 
 <pb facs="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BucknellDSC/heresies/main/issue04/images/Heresies_04_119jpg" n="118" xml:id="img_0118"/>
 
 signs once unique to particular tribal sections, isolated from
 each other in the past, changed as they came into direct con-
 tact with each other. Women now married into other groups
 which led to the mixing of traditional designs.
 The society in which Turkmen live has been transformed
 since the nineteenth century, affecting the women who tradi-
 tionally weave the carpets as well as their relation to the
 mode of production of these carpets. Production has shifted
 its locus from kinship units to a nonkinship context, the fac-
 tory. The family mode of production could not meet the ris-
 ing demand for carpets, thus contract weaving and factories
 increased.
 The first factories in the provinces employed only men,
 but women were weaving out of the home in women’s centers
 or prisons at that time. In the past few years factories in
 Kabul have begun to train and employ women who weave in
 rooms separate from the men. Because of the profit to be
 gained from weaving, non-Turkmen women have begun to
 take up carpet weaving—often by apprenticing themselves to
 Turkmen women in their homes or by going to the factories
 to learn. Weaving now serves as one of the few nondomestic
 occupations open to women in Afghanistan. At a time when
 the family-centered tribal society is breaking down, carpet
 weaving allows women an opportunity to participate in a
 more complex, non-kin-based economy.
 Since the days when Turkmen women lived on the Rus-
 sian steppes and wove for their families, conditions have
 changed. The women who remained in the Soviet Union
 were employed in state-controlled factories before the women
 who moved to Afghanistan.
 Afghani Turkmen women still weave under traditional
 conditions or on contract; primarily it is non-Turkmen
 women in Afghanistan who have begun factory work. Where
 Turkmen women oversee the process in factories, the high
 quality of weave has been maintained.
 Turkmen women have always had an important influence
 on weaving, originally produced for exclusively domestic use
 but now produced for market consumption as well. Although
 the traditional colors and designs have changed because of
 political boundaries, migration and altered modes of produc-
 tion, Turkmen women continue to produce fine examples of
 weaving.
 Note: Material for this article comes from travel through
 Turkmen regions in Afghanistan in 1971 and observations in
 a Kabul carpet factory in December 1975 and February
 1977. Special thanks are due to Hajji Ewaz Badghisi, his
 wife, Bayram, and daughter, Aidgol, for their patience in ex-
 plaining the techniques of weaving and dyeing. 1 also wish to
 acknowledge the assistance of Dr. Brian Spooner and Pat
 Barr for their part in helping me learn about the Turkmen
 and their weaving in the twentieth century.
 *Brian Spooner, “Afghan Carpets,” Expedition 15 (2),
 1973, p. 15.
 
 Mary A. Martin is a cultural anthropologist who has worked in Iran and Afghanistan.
 She lives in Philadelphia.
 
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